Social-Environmental Conflicts, Extractivism and Human Rights in Latin America

Malayna Raftopoulos

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351135610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book focuses on the issues of global environmental injustice and human rights violations and explores the scope and limits of the potential of human rights to influence environmental justice. It offers a multidisciplinary perspective on contemporary development discussions, analysing some of the crucial challenges, contradictions and promises within current environmental and human rights practices in Latin America. The contributors examine how the extraction and exploitation of natural resources and the further commodification of nature have affected local communities in the region and how these policies have impacted on the promotion and protection of human rights as communities struggle to defend their rights and territories. The book analyses the emergence of transnational activism in the context of collective action organised around socio-environmental conflicts, the infringement of basic human rights and the emergence of alternative and sometimes conflicting development models. Furthermore, it critically discusses why governments are often willing to override their commitments to sustainability and human rights to promote their development agenda.

The chapters originally published as a special issue in The International Journal of Human Rights.

Contemporary debates on social-environmental conflicts, extractivism and human rights in Latin America

Malayna Raftopoulos

This opening contribution to ‘Social-Environmental Conflicts, Extractivism and Human Rights in Latin America’ analyses how human rights have emerged as a weapon in the political battleground over the environment as natural resource extraction has become an increasingly contested and politicised form of development. It examines the link between human rights abuses and extractivism, arguing that this new cycle of protests has opened up new political spaces for human rights based resistance. Furthermore, the explosion of socio-environmental conflicts that have accompanied the expansion and politicisation of natural resources has highlighted the different conceptualisations of nature, development and human rights that exist within Latin America. While new human rights perspectives are emerging in the region, mainstream human rights discourses are providing social movements and activists with the legal power to challenge extractivism and critique the current development agenda. However, while the application of human rights discourses can put pressure on governments, it has yielded limited concrete results largely because the state as a guardian of human rights remains fragile in Latin America and is willing to override their commitment to human and environmental rights in the pursuit of development. Lastly, individual contributions to the volume are introduced and future directions for research in natural resource development and human rights are suggested.

Introduction

Natural resource exploitation, and the increasing number of large-scale and mega-development projects in the region, has made Latin America one of the most dangerous places for human rights activists and environmentalists in the world. Even progressive governments such as Ecuador have employed a zero-tolerance policy towards anyone opposing natural resource extraction. Ecuadorian authorities have led a campaign to vilify and stigmatise indigenous groups and social movements, labelling them ‘environmental extremists’ or ‘terrorists’ in an attempt to build a framework of acceptance for curtailing human rights in the name of development. President Rafael Correa even attempted to close down the country’s leading grassroots environmental organisation, Acción Ecológica, in a clear reprisal over their support for the Shuar Indigenous People who are embroiled in a bitter conflict with the government over a planned mega-copper mine on their ancestral lands in the southern Ecuadorian Amazon. The link between human rights abuses and natural resources has become the focus of growing concern as governments throughout the region push through major development projects without integrating economic, social and cultural rights. Although the continent has a long history of extracting and exploiting natural resources dating back to the colonial era, there has been a marked increase in these activities in the region in the last decade or so, associated with the strong international demand for raw materials and a cycle of high prices. However, the recent downturn in the price of minerals and hydrocarbons has further exacerbated the problem, as the decline in profits is offset by the further expansion of extractive frontiers. The proliferation of extractivist activities and its diversification into new areas such as hydroelectricity has significantly impacted on the enjoyment of human rights across the hemisphere and has become a permanent cause of social-environmental conflicts. While governments and multinational corporations have been riding the wave of the commodities boom, indigenous and peasant communities have found themselves ‘at the leading edge of both the extractive capital frontier and the related social conflict’.¹ These social-environmental conflicts are not isolated but are occurring throughout the continent, engaging communities in a continual battle against natural resource exploitation and the forces of global capital, resulting in repeated and widespread clashes, violence, repression and human rights abuses perpetuated by the state or security forces. As the anthropologist Philippe Descola observed, ‘[o]ne does not have to be a great seer to predict that the relationship between humans and nature will, in all probability, be the most important question of the present century’.² Yet, despite this, the relationship between human rights, extractivism and the environment remains under-researched and under-theorised.

Human rights have emerged as a weapon in the political battleground over the environment as natural resource extraction has become an increasingly contested and politicised form of development. Latin American governments have pursued extraction relentlessly, regardless of the socio-environmental costs and the abrogation of the most fundamental human rights that this development model entails. A report published by Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2015, while stating that states have the freedom to exploit their natural resources through concessions and private or public investments of either a national or international nature, also importantly emphasised that these activities should not be executed at the expense of human rights and justice.³ Along with this increasing recognition of the linkage between human rights and extractivism, questions are also being raised within human rights law over approaches to environmental protection and recognition of intercultural perspectives. The explosion of social-environmental conflicts that has accompanied the expansion of extractive activities has posed a challenge to the political and economic ideology of the current development model. This challenge comes from the new relational ontologies of local and indigenous communities and cultures who have opened up debates about the relationship between the human and non-human world, the rights of nature and human rights and duties.

While extractivism previously referred to activities that involved extracting, such as in mining, oil and gas, the term is now increasingly used to refer to the accelerated pace of natural resource exploitation at an industrial level and the construction of mega-projects and infrastructure intended to make full use of natural resources.⁴ During the expansion of the extractive and infrastructure frontiers in Latin America, territories that were previously isolated or protected and ‘often biologically fragile environments populated by vulnerable populations who share their land with minerals or energy sources’ have been opened up for exploitation.⁵ According to a study conducted by Global Witness, 2015 was the worst year on record for the murder of land and environmental defenders with a total of 185 assassinations across the globe.⁶ In March 2016, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council adopted a landmark resolution requiring states to ensure the rights and safety of human rights defenders working towards the realisation of economic, social and cultural rights.⁷ Speaking ahead of World Environment Day 2016, The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, John Knox, along with the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, Michel Forst, and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous People, Victoria Tauli Corpuz, issued a joint statement urging governments to protect environmental rights defenders.⁸ However, increasingly governments across Latin America are criminalising social protests through the use of repressive legislation, and deterring or curtailing communities and activists from political mobilisation through the use of violence, kidnapping, torture, harassment and threats. The link between environmental injustice and human rights transgressions highlights the urgent need to bring together human rights and the environment, ‘two dominant legal and social discourses often assumed to have at best an uneasy, and at worse an antithetical relationship’.⁹

The murder of Berta Cáceres, a well-known activist for indigenous rights, human rights and environmental protection in Honduras in March 2016 exposed the level of violence that often accompanies mega-projects and resource extraction in Latin America as indigenous communities and governments clash over the use and control of natural resources and land. Opposing the construction of four dams designed to power future mining operations along the Gualcarque River, an area sacred to the Lenca indigenous community in western Honduras and known collectively as the Agua Zarca Dam, Cáceres waged a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam developer, Sinohydro, to pull out of the project. From the Chevron case in Ecuador, to the Belo Monte dam protests in Brazil and the TIPNIS (Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboró Securé) dispute in Bolivia, communities and activists across Latin America are engaged in struggles against extractive or damaging infrastructural activities taking place in their territories. Current Latin American governments’ continued fidelity to the neoliberal developmental agenda, coupled with globalisation, has led to a new cycle of protests in the region and opened up new political spaces for human rights based resistance in natural resource governance to transnational networks of (indigenous) social movements, human rights actors and nongovernmental organisations to mobilise.

Despite the widespread optimism that the alternative platforms put forward by the left and centre-left governments would transcend modernist development paradigms following the legitimacy crisis of neoliberalism, apparently progressive governments have not only continued but have intensified the neoliberal policy of extractivism. This has led to a plethora of social-environmental conflicts and the continued violation of both human and environmental rights throughout Latin America as democratic processes are eroded alongside renewed efforts to expand extractive frontiers. This opening contribution examines the link between human rights abuses and extractivism, arguing that this new cycle of protests has opened up new political spaces for human rights based resistance. Furthermore, the explosion of socio-environmental conflicts that have accompanied the expansion and politicisation of natural resources has highlighted the different conceptualisations of nature, development and human rights that exist within Latin America. Peasant and indigenous communities have found themselves at the forefront of the resource wars as they clash with governments and multinational corporations over the use and control of the global commons. With current international law on environmental management by sovereign states limited to managing the environment in a manner that the misuse of natural resources does not disadvantage other states,¹⁰ the international human rights framework has become increasingly important. The potential of human rights to act as ‘language of protest’ and a ‘platform for change’¹¹ has contributed to the increasing transnationalisation of human rights discourses in the last two decades and led to the development of transnational human rights networks that bring together ordinary social actors in their pursuit against similar claims of injustice. While new human rights perspectives are emerging in the region, mainstream human rights discourses are providing social movements and activists with the legal power to challenge extractivism and critique the current development agenda. However, the application of human rights discourses so far has yielded limited results largely because the state as a guardian of human rights remains fragile in Latin America and is willing to override their commitment to human and environmental rights in the pursuit of development. The article is concluded by discussing the individual contributions to the volume and also future directions for research in natural resource development and human rights.

Alternatives to development and extractivism

The dilemma between exploiting natural resources for socio-economic development and defending both human and environmental rights represents a major challenge for Latin American countries. Since colonial times, Latin America’s relationship with natural resources has been a source of conflicting political, social and economic dynamics. As Haarstad comments, ‘natural resources have traditionally been considered a curse on Latin American societies, from the plundering of the colonial era to the ills of commodity dependency in later years’.¹² Moreover, the socio-economic conditions produced by extractivist-based economies have contributed to ecological destruction, widespread poverty and social injustice throughout the region. Schmink and Jouve-Martín explain that ‘Latin America’s historical dependency on natural resources, both for local livelihoods and to supply an evolving global market, has made environmental issues central in policy debates and in widespread contests over the meaning and use of natural species and habitats, carried out against the region’s persistent legacy of inequality’.¹³ This ‘curse of abundance’ has...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Contemporary debates on social-environmental conflicts, extractivism and human rights in Latin America
• 2 ‘ …Beggars sitting on a sack of gold’: Oil exploration in the Ecuadorian Amazon as buen vivir and sustainable development
• 3 State-led extractivism and the frustration of indigenous self-determined development: lessons from Bolivia
• 4 Ethnic rights and the dilemma of extractive development in plurinational Bolivia
• 5 The international human rights discourse as a strategic focus in socio-environmental conflicts: the case of hydro-electric dams in Brazil
• 6 Extracting justice? Colombia’s commitment to mining and energy as a foundation for peace
• Index